


Lack of Purpose

by Coffeebookboy



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Mention of abuse, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Psychoanalyzation, Slight Existentialism, mention of childhood trauma, omnicient perspective, ptsd mention, social psychology (i am no expert), sort of will pov, thinking about thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:47:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22113574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coffeebookboy/pseuds/Coffeebookboy
Summary: An exploration of the way Will feels about his own life and experiences after the fall.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	Lack of Purpose

Losing eyesight feels a little bit like watching the world drift out of place. It doesn’t initially feel like you’re losing something. It feels as if you’re floating further and further away without moving. At least, that’s the sensation of losing your middle distance. You’re perfectly still, squinting and struggling, but the world is fading away. Not just blurry, but faded. Or altogether too bright. Colours that are similar to each other blend together whereas the odd ones out seem to pierce your retinas painfully. And for all the discomfort, once you’ve noticed the change occurring, you can never ignore it again. And even though it may be too late, the damage done, you try to convince yourself that your eyes are just strained or tired. That everything will come back into focus in a moment. So you don’t call the doctor, and if you go in it goes unmentioned. For a long time, too long. And you aren’t blind yet, so why bother? 

Will Graham was watching his world float further and further away. Familiar faces becoming unrecognizable and street signs becoming unimportant or neglected. ‘It’s not me it’s the damn county. They don’t maintain their signs anymore. Were they always making them this small? I swear they weren’t always that size.” Or, “No that wasn’t the road, it’s up here.” Then he proceeds to make a loop around the block, hoping there isn’t a pesky one-way road waiting to trap him and make him turn around, therefore admitting he’d made a mistake. It happened more and more often now. His glasses didn’t help of course, they’d always been a prop. Clear glass lenses he’d bought in college because a friend with glasses said people didn’t notice him. ‘They look right through me, Willy, I swear.’ Will had always hated that nickname, people didn’t call him that after college. Only a few folks even used his first name after his 30th birthday. It was just Mr. Graham. Especially at work, which had been nice. 

He’d liked the job at Quantico before Jack Crawford forced him into the field. Teaching was impersonal at that level of education. You get a certain level of expertise and people stop considering it rude when you don’t talk to them. No one expects someone with a doctorate and two published works on social psychology to be social anymore. As if one automatically becomes holier-than-thou without all the bad rep that would come with actually behaving that way to soothe an inflamed ego. Which Will certainly had none of. Ego, that is. His ego had been stomped out of him deliberately by the man in the mirror. Not due to abuse or failure, although there had been plenty of that in his life, but due to a desire to seem as small as possible in a room. If he took up less space, no one expected things of him. His reputation simply was. And then he could never disappoint anyone ever again, excepting himself.

Before Hannibal Lecter and after. That is how Will Graham categorized his life. And now that he was aging, or maybe he was late to feel the effects of it, the two chapters had begun to blur together. Just like the world around him. Certain memories getting mixed up and out of order. ‘Was that real or just a dream? Does it matter?’ Some events sticking out in his mind, too sharp, too powerful. The stigma of trauma is that it changes you. Makes you stronger if you let it, weaker if you let it do that too. That you define your trauma, and not the other way around. Some ignorant second-rate psychologist must’ve decided this one day and written a study on it. Claiming that, everyone has trauma in one way or another. Pain is in the sensory cells of the beholder. Everyone just took his word for it.   
But it wasn’t entirely true.

Not everyone had experienced trauma. Some folk’s trauma would be a walk in the park for someone else, trivial even, but it was still traumatic for the person in question. And if Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was evident of anything it was that while sometimes we may not be fully aware of how an experience has affected us, the scars that mar our memories are very real. And we most certainly do not define our own trauma. At least, not all of us have that option.

Will knew that great parts of his childhood were buried deep in his subconscious, hidden from his conscious brain. He knew this simply because, years were missing. Years that he knew vaguely where he should have been and whom he should have been around, but he couldn’t remember the details at all. As if he’d fast forwarded through his lifetime to a later date, older and not much wiser, thrown into his young adulthood entirely unprepared. But everyone feels that way, right? No one is truly prepared when the day comes. To move out, to get your first job. Go to college or not go to college. Whatever path, privileged or severely underprivileged, a crossroads comes. You are forced to leave your childhood behind. Some might say they never had a childhood, but just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Even the most neglected and mistreated of toddlers look at the world through eyes of wonder, simply because that is all they have. A baby doesn’t know he isn’t getting proper nutrition, only that his tummy hurts and that means it’s time to cry. In truth, absolutely no baby is intelligent enough that he is crying out into the void, ‘It isn’t fair! It just isn’t fair!’ Any adult who hears that in a baby’s cry is projecting onto said infant. Hoping that this far more innocent and helpless creature could possibly understand how terrifying the world truly is. But that sets in later, with critical thinking. 

It seemed tragic to Alana Bloom when Will had confessed he didn’t really remember his childhood. He could see it in her eyes, feel it. Pity, compassion, curiousity. Concern. She’d looked at him like all she wanted in the world was to hold that younger Will and tell him he was fantastic and lovable and deserved good things. All the things a child deserves to hear. To motivate them. But Will didn’t want her to love him like a child. Far from it. So he’d simply said, “It’s better this way. My dad was pretty fucked up. Who knows what I’ve blocked out.” And prayed she would drop it at that. She had. But she had never stopped prying. 

With Hannibal it was different. He didn’t pry. He didn’t pity Will. Any questions he’d asked seemed motivated purely by the process of helping Will conquer his inner demons. To learn about himself in a way he’d refused to for the greater part of his life. Will didn’t want to know himself because he felt that if he understood what went on in his own brain, truly understood, then other people would see it too. Not knowing what others would see or how it would make them feel was too terrible a thought. He’d tried to open up in that way to Alana and she had initially recoiled. Child psychiatrists and youth pastors and professors had all done the same. So at some point in his life he just stopped trying to get an outside perspective. Instead condemning himself to cycle through the same thought patterns. Reviewing the same memories. Over and over. He didn’t want a therapist poking through his brain. 

Will didn’t live his life in the present moment, feet planted on the ground. He lived his life like Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut. Everything real, painfully real, but unstuck in time. Past, present, and future all swirling around him and falling like pebbles into a pool. Those ripples then carried out fully as trains of thought. Breaking against each other and combining and eventually lapping against the beaches of his mind, spilling over the edge. These little spills were the few times he opened his mouth in a day. And instead of exposing his true trains of thought that were perhaps too personal, or snippets of his memories, cynicism poured out. He would share the feelings or conclusions of his thoughts without the context. Slathering them onto white lies and unimportant bullshit. He might say something profound about grief and rather than admit he was thinking of a dead friend, he would go on to mention a name he’d seen in the obituaries column. Or blame it on a case from work that left behind family members.. It was never really a lie. He always had had great compassion for the victims in his line of work. He had far too much empathy to account for. But at the end of the day, very little of it applied to himself. He didn’t feel much towards himself and his experiences. He just thought about them. Without feelings. 

Talking about himself with Hannibal he didn’t feel like that was wrong. There was no pressure to feel more than he already did. Just a subtle reminder that his feelings did matter too, that he was in fact deserving of empathy, not just sympathy. And for years Hannibal didn’t express any of either during their conversations. But Will knew it was there. Somehow, he knew. It showed in other ways. Hannibal inviting him over for dinner may have seemed a selfish act, a display of ego and a desire to impress. But truthfully, part of Will knew that Hannibal wanted to feed him in order to preserve him. Keep him from wasting away. One look at Will’s ribs and Hannibal had recognized the signs of childhood emaciation. The body never truly recovers. And so Hannibal fed him. And after countless meals had been shared, Will came to the conclusion that even Hannibal was not specifically aware of his own efforts. He simply acted as he always had. Being swallowed by gentleness and a deep desire to provide without ever being aware of his weakness. His compassion for Will was inconvenient, but even he didn’t recognize how deeply it had been changing him. 

Five years. It had been five years since they’d slain the dragon. And in all those years, Will had failed to truly absorb the changes Hannibal’s love had wrought on his mind. In contrast to the smitten fool Hannibal had happily become. It wasn’t that Will didn’t love him. God, how he loved him. Deeply and overwhelmingly so. And he was fully aware of the changes Hannibal had brought about in him in other senses. His bloodlust, his resilience. An animal desire to be held back by nothing, to define his own sense of freedom, even in the bindings of their relationship to each other. There were no chains. No shackles. The ties that bind do not also have to be the end all of independence. No matter how possessive the two of them became, they felt stronger as individuals together. Will loved his dogs, his new pack, just as deeply as he ever had. But he no longer felt he needed the pack to hold him together. Their togetherness as a family; Hannibal, the dogs, and Will — was not a restraining factor. Instead, it made him feel powerful. Hannibal described the feeling once as purpose. Loving Will did not make him weak, rather, it made him much more fierce for having something to lose. It made him more dangerous. Indomitable. Will could understand that and felt it in his own way. Not necessarily a desire to protect Hannibal, but a desire to own and understand him ever more with each passing day. To know he could never lose that love and understanding once he’d gained it was to know he could never lose himself again. They were one and the same.

That was purpose.

**Author's Note:**

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